Heritage Turkeys Selling Briskly, Even at $10 a Pound

WILLIAM NEUMAN

Thursday

Nov 26, 2009 at 12:01 AMDec 1, 2009 at 9:47 AM

A trend for birds that are said to be more flavorful, but cost more and take longer to raise.

Handmade chocolates, artisanal cheeses, vintage Champagne — consumers are thinking twice about splurging on such luxurious goods during the tough economic times. But sales of at least one fancy food item have held up: gourmet turkeys that easily cost $100 or more.

“It’s a hot item,” said Bill Niman, a prominent advocate for sustainable agriculture who this year jumped into the so-called heritage turkey market — older breeds of birds that had all but disappeared until championed by preservationists and foodies.

He raised 2,500 birds for Thanksgiving and “sold every bird.”

Mr. Niman’s turkeys were priced at $6.99 a pound. Many small farmers sell their birds direct to customers for as much as $10 a pound, or 10 to 20 times the cost of a typical supermarket turkey.

That means a heritage turkey big enough for a large Thanksgiving gathering, say 18 pounds, can run $180. Even at that price, farmers who breed heritage turkeys are recording brisk sales.

Heritage turkeys are old-fashioned breeds that resemble their wild ancestors more closely than do modern breeds. Devotees say they are more flavorful and have a higher proportion of dark meat than the modern birds.

But even with high demand and prices to match, many of the producers say they are having trouble making money. That is because the old-time breeds — with names like Black Spanish and Bourbon Red — take longer and cost far more to raise than their modern competition, a turkey breed known as the Broad-Breasted White. Broad-breasted turkeys grow quickly, have lots of white meat and are docile enough that they can easily be mass-produced in large-scale poultry operations.

The heritage breeds were popular 100 years ago but almost disappeared until preservationists, sustainable agriculture advocates and food enthusiasts worked to bring them back into vogue. They are generally raised on small farms, allowed to feed on pasture and roam freely. While broad-breasted birds can mature in 14 weeks, heritage birds take 28 weeks.

Enthusiasts say they taste better and have firmer, darker meat. But the birds also come with a compelling story that a frozen Butterball can’t match. Breeds from a bygone era, allowed to run free, are promoted as the edible embodiment of older ways of farming and eating — a political statement with a side of cranberry sauce.

“The prices seem very high at first, if you compare them to a bird at the supermarket,” said Mark Scherzer, who raised about 95 heritage turkeys this year on his 40-acre farm in Germantown, N.Y. “But when you consider the slaughtering at our scale, you’re paying a premium for that. You’re feeding them organic grain and it takes them more than twice as long to get to market size.”

Mr. Scherzer and his partner, Peter Davies, raised their price this year to $10 a pound, from $8.75 last year. Mr. Scherzer said only a few customers balked at the higher price and they had no difficulty selling all their birds. Still, he said, farmers do not make an outsize profit.

He and his partner paid $9 each for day-old poults from a hatchery last spring. And on Monday, they trucked the birds to a slaughterhouse that charged $10 a head to kill them. Those costs alone put the cost for each bird well above the retail price of a typical supermarket turkey. That also does not include the expenses of high-end organic feed, labor, overhead and birds lost to illness or predators.

“Ten bucks a pound for turkey is a whole bunch of money,” said Ed Di Gangi, who nonetheless was happy to pay $81 for a heritage bird that weighed a bit more than eight pounds. He bought the bird at a Pittsburgh farmers market from Margaret Henry, a farmer from northwest Pennsylvania. “There’s certainly sticker shock, but it’s not something we do all the time,” he said.

Mr. Di Gangi, 61, who manages a hospital communications center and lives in suburban Pittsburgh, said that over the last year he had been paying more attention to where his food comes from. With a heritage bird, he feels he will have a healthier meal and support a local organic farmer instead of a commercial turkey mill.

But he has had some bemused responses from friends who got free turkeys in supermarket promotions.

“There have been a couple of blank stares, a couple of ‘Oh wows’ and a couple of, ‘Why are you doing that?’ ” Mr. Di Gangi said.

It is not clear how many heritage birds are sold each year. A conservative estimate, according to some producers, is 20,000 to 30,000 birds. That is a blip compared with the 273 million broad-breasted turkeys produced annually in the United States (46 million of those are eaten on Thanksgiving).

Stephanie Turco and her husband, Paul Alward, raised about 400 heritage turkeys last year on their farm in New Paltz, N.Y. But feed costs soared and they had a hard time selling the birds, priced at $7 a pound, at the height of the recession. Renting space at a freezer to store unsold birds increased their costs further. This year, they raised only about 60 birds, selling them for $7.50 a pound.

“If we wanted to really make money on them, they should be $12 a pound,” she said. “The question is, does it pay for the farmer to do it?”

Frank Reese, a renowned breeder, has helped lead the crusade to save the heritage breeds and works with farmers associated with his Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch in Lindsborg, Kan., to market 9,500 turkeys a year. Most are sold on the Internet, through a company called Heritage Foods USA and shipped to buyers by overnight delivery.

Mr. Reese ran into problems this year when the slaughterhouse he had used shut, forcing him to truck his turkeys to Illinois and Ohio for processing, increasing his costs by about 10 percent.

“Our turkeys are very expensive, not because of the turkey but because of the processing and shipping,” he said. “The problem is the infrastructure to support truly honest-to-God sustainable agriculture is not there.”

Mr. Niman, who has begun breeding birds on his farm in Marin County, Calif., is looking for ways to overcome such obstacles. He envisions building a network of farmers to raise heritage birds, working together to lower the cost of feed, processing and marketing as volume increases.

Until then, he said, there are plenty of people “willing to pay $100 for an exceptional turkey that’s more reflective of how things were at one time and it’s supporting traditional agriculture.” He added, “And the birds taste dramatically different.”

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